URBS 303 - Advanced Debates in Urban Studies

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

This seminar focuses on selected issues of importance in Urban Studies. Topics vary according to the instructor. The course is required of all majors and may be taken during the junior or senior years; it can be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2020/21a: PRESERVING WHOSE CITY? Memory, Planning, and Placemaking. (Same as GEOG 303) ”Memoria” was a classical muse, symbolizing society’s existence in time and space, thereby linking the past, present, and future. In the 19th century, collective memory served “imagined communities” of nationalism, modernism, and urbanism. During the “memory boom” of the 20th century arose issues of genocide, holocaust, human rights, multiculturalism, historic preservation. Rather than being simple and transparent, collective memory has served a variety of interests and purposes.

Memory now fosters place identity, tourism, and symbolism in our globalized and urbanized world. Cities recognize heritage sites, historic districts, monuments and landmarks, memorials, and other special areas as strategies of placemaking – the social, spatial, and symbolic processes by which distinctive places emerge. While not a new phenomenon, placemaking now increasingly results from planning and branding campaigns by governmental, commercial, and community organizations.

This seminar focuses on the role of place memory in the planning, governance, and cultures of cities. We consider both official historic designations and grassroots efforts of “counter-memory” to recognize underappreciated and marginalized groups. Field trips examine the making of historic places in the Hudson Valley and New York City. After examining the theory and practice of historic placemaking, students carry out research on sites of their own choosing. Brian Godfrey.

Topic for 2020/21b: Design, Disability, and the Demos: or, Critical Access Studies and the Right to the City. This seminar engages critical disability studies as a lens through which to investigate the spatial politics of urban everyday life in the contemporary United States–and to imagine the world otherwise. Through a series of readings, projects, and speculative design provocations, we examine the structures and practices that constitute ordinary urban life, and the forms of collective life they enable or disable. We interrogate the extensive network of supports–roads and bricks, pipes and wires, screens and cables, services and protocols–that produce the phantasmatic autonomy of a normative urban subject. We ask: why do only some forms of vulnerability and interdependence command the infrastructures of the commons? What does the Just City look like–and feel and sound like–when centered in the experience of non-conforming bodies and minds? Informed by recent art, activism and scholarship in critical disabilities studies, feminist and queer theory and critical urban studies, students engage the themes of the course through a series of individual and collaborative projects. Lisa Brawley.

Strongly recommended: Architectural Design, or a studio art course.

Prerequisite(s): URBS 100 and URBS 200 or the equivalent, and permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS